Zynga’s new game The Ville takes virtual sex to the masses

This article was originally posted in Future of Sex magazine.

Social gaming giant Zynga, purveyor of Facebook games such as CityVille and FarmVille, is making things a little racier with its latest product The Ville, launched today.

As the video shows, users can build the “home of your dreams” and invite their Facebook friends over to have fun there. The fun can start with talking, cooking, and dancing, and then go a little further.

As Rafe Needleman of CNET reports:

According to Zynga executive producer David Gray, when someone is in your house and you begin to interact with them, you can level up by interacting with them in ways that the game sees as romantic. As you climb the experience tree, you eventually unlock the capability to initiate the “happiness home run,” or just “whoopee” as Gray called it in an interview.

When you do so, the two characters begin to disrobe on-screen (not completely, though) and the bed in the virtual bedroom gets covered, briefly, with little floating hearts.

Of course this is hardly the highly explicit interaction possible in games such as Red Light Center or even Second Life, but it is taking the idea of virtual sex into a far broader domain.

While The Sims also has a similar concept of making whoopee, this is interaction with a computer game, not other people. In The Ville, you are interacting with people who have a Facebook profile, and you either already know or might meet sometime. As such, there is the potential for The Ville to be effectively a dating site which will lead either to real-life catch-ups, or potentially inviting friends to go to virtual worlds that do not draw the veil so early.

All of which may increase people’s appetite for the ever-growing world of virtual sex.